Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the creation of a new task force to monitor competition in technology markets. Given the inadequacies of federal antitrust enforcement over the past generation, we welcome the new task force and reiterate our suggestions for … | Continue reading
Update, 2:35 p.m.: The coalition of groups behind Privacy for All has grown since time of publishing. This update reflects the latest count.Privacy is a right. It is past time for California to ensure that the companies using secretive practices to make money off of our personal … | Continue reading
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is standing with Californians demanding more control over their personal data by supporting the Privacy For All bill, which requires tech companies to get their permission to share and use private information.“All eyes are on … | Continue reading
[This is a guest post authored by Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice. It was originally published in The End of Trust (McSweeney's 54)]In December 2017, FBI agents forced Rakem Balogun and his fifteen-year-old son out of their Dallas home. They arres … | Continue reading
The good news: TLS 1.3 is available, and the protocol, which powers HTTPS and many other encrypted communications, is better and more secure than its predecessors (including SSL). The bad news: Thanks to a financial industry group called BITS, there’s a look-alike protocol brewin … | Continue reading
Last year, the U.S. Senate held a hearing about consumer privacy without a single voice for actual consumers. At the time, we were promised more hearings with more diverse voices. And while a hearing a month later with consumer advocates did seem to be a step forward, this week's … | Continue reading
It’s time for governments to confront the harmful consequences of using facial recognition technology as an instrument of surveillance. Yet law enforcement agencies across the country are purchasing face surveillance technology with insufficient oversight—despite the many ways it … | Continue reading
EFF has just filed an amicus brief in support of Google’s petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the long-running case of Oracle v. Google. The case asks whether functional aspects of computer programs are copyrightable, and involves two dangerous court opinions that he … | Continue reading
Article 13 is the on-again/off-again controversial proposal to make virtually every online community, service, and platform legally liable for any infringing material posted by their users, even very briefly, even if there was no conceivable way for the online service provider to … | Continue reading
Great news out of Washington state: a federal judge has ruled that the First Amendment protects speech on the Internet, even from anonymous speakers, and even if it’s embarrassing.EFF has been fighting this statute for a long time. It’s a prime example of how sloppy approaches to … | Continue reading
DarkMatter, the notorious cyber-mercenary firm based in the United Arab Emirates, is seeking to become approved as a top-level certificate authority in Mozilla’s root certificate program. Giving such a trusted position to this company would be a very bad idea. DarkMatter has a bu … | Continue reading
More lessons from "Facebook Research"Last week, Facebook was caught using a sketchy market research app to gobble large amounts of sensitive user activity after instructing users to alter the root certificate store on their phones. A day after, Google pulled a similar iOS “resear … | Continue reading
Patent trolls aren’t a myth. They aren’t a bedtime story. Ask a software developer—they’re likely to know someone who has been sued or otherwise threatened by one, if they haven’t been themselves.Unfortunately, the new director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is i … | Continue reading
Take ActionContact Luxembourg's Negotiators Today!This month, the EU hopes to conclude the Copyright in the Single Digital Market Directive, with no sign that they will improve or delete Articles 11 and 13. This is a dangerous mistake, because these articles have the power to cru … | Continue reading
Sweden: Take Action Here.Germany: Take Action Here. Luxembourg: Take Action Here.Poland: Take Action Here.The new EU Copyright Directive is progressing at an alarming rate. This week, the EU is asking its member-states to approve new negotiating positions for the final language. … | Continue reading
Every now and then we have to remind someone that it's not illegal for people to report facts that they dislike. This time, the offender is electric scooter rental company Bird Rides, Inc.Electric scooters have swamped a number of cities across the US, many of the scooters carele … | Continue reading
We’ve come a long way since we launched Encrypt the Web, our initiative to onboard the World Wide Web to HTTPS. Not only has Let’s Encrypt issued over 380 million certificates, but also nearly 85% of page loads in the United States are over HTTPS, and both figures are still on an … | Continue reading
This article was first published on Just Security.Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s counterpart to the National Security Agency (NSA), has fired the latest shot in the crypto wars. In a post to Lawfare titled Principles for a More Informed Exceptional Access … | Continue reading
There’s a lot of legitimate concern these days about Internet giants and the lack of competition in the technology sector. It’s still easy and cheap to put up a website, build an app, or organize a group of people online, but a few large corporations have outsized power over the … | Continue reading
When is software free? Is it enough that the software be licensed under a free or open license? What about patents? Software as a service? Trade secrets? What about DRM? Is software ever free?There's a saying in the software freedom movement: "if you can't open it, it's not yours … | Continue reading
end_of_trust_interior_pages_lores.pdf | Continue reading
By Dave Maass and Beryl LiptonEFF and MuckRock have filed hundreds of public records requests with law enforcement agencies around the country to reveal how data collected from automated license plate readers (ALPR) is used to track the travel patterns of drivers. We focused excl … | Continue reading
This year, we celebrated the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank. Alice made clear that generic computers do not make abstract ideas eligible for patent protection. Following the decision, district courts across the country started rejec … | Continue reading
With Election Day just hours away, we are seeing reports across the country that electronic voting machines are already inaccurately recording votes and questions are being raised about potential foreign interference after 2016. While the responsibility to deal with these issues … | Continue reading
Spot the Surveillance is a virtual reality (VR) experience that teaches people how to identify the various spying technologies that police may deploy in communities.The user is placed in a 360-degree scene in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco, where a young resid … | Continue reading
Google Chrome is the most popular browser in the world. Chrome routinely leads the pack in features for security and usability, most recently helping to drive the adoption of HTTPS. But when it comes to privacy, specifically protecting users from tracking, most of its rivals leav … | Continue reading
Iris recognition or iris scanning is the process of using visible and near-infrared light to take a high-contrast photograph of a person’s iris. It is a form of biometric technology in the same category as face recognition and fingerprinting. Advocates of iris scanning technology … | Continue reading
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation won petitions submitted to the Library of Congress that will make it easier for people to legally remove or repair software in the Amazon Echo, in cars, and in personal digital devices, but the library refused to issue the kind … | Continue reading
Welcome to a brand new kind of whodunnit. This one has everything: an extremely popular game, a short-lived takedown, and so very many memes. The ways of the DMCA and YouTube are unknown and unknowable.Trailers are a time-tested and proven way of getting attention for a new piece … | Continue reading
In a democracy, people should have the right to read, and publish, the law. In theory, that should be easier than ever today. The Internet has vastly improved public access to the “operating system” of our government—the local, state, and federal statutes and regulations we are e … | Continue reading
Your strong support helped us persuade California’s lawmakers to do the right thing on many important technology bills debated on the chamber floors this year. With your help, EFF won an unprecedented number of victories, supporting good bills and stopping those that would have h … | Continue reading
If you've ever bought an inkjet printer, you know just how much the manufacturers charge for ink (more than vintage Champagne!) and you may also know that you can avoid those sky-high prices by buying third-party inks, or refilled cartridges, or kits to refill your own cartridges … | Continue reading
Millions of Californians are waiting for Gov. Jerry Brown to affirm their call for a free and open Internet.After Congress reversed the Federal Communication Commission’s 2015 Open Internet Order, states have had to step up to ensure that all traffic on the Internet is treated eq … | Continue reading
Today, the content-delivery network Cloudflare is announcing an experimental deployment of a new web privacy technology called ESNI. We’re excited to see this development, and we look forward to a future where ESNI makes the web more private for all its users.Over the past severa … | Continue reading
Today, the content-delivery network Cloudflare is announcing an experimental deployment of a new web privacy technology called ESNI. We’re excited to see this development, and we look forward to a future where ESNI makes the web more private for all its users.Over the past severa … | Continue reading
Aboard the Arctic Sunrise, a working icebreaker that has sailed to the Arctic Circle, the Congo, and the Amazon Rivers under Greenpeace’s stead, EFF joined several civil liberties and environmental rights groups to send a message: no longer will we be bullied by malicious lawsuit … | Continue reading
Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it onli … | Continue reading
Among the many bills awaiting the signature—or veto—of Governor Jerry Brown is AB 3131, a measure that would ensure transparency about police militarization across the State of California. While we are disappointed in recent legislative amendments that weakened the original bill, … | Continue reading
Today, in a vote that split almost every major EU party, Members of the European Parliament adopted every terrible proposal in the new Copyright Directive and rejected every good one, setting the stage for mass, automated surveillance and arbitrary censorship of the internet: tex … | Continue reading
In Passing A.B. 2192, California Leads the Country in Open AccessThe California legislature just scored a huge win in the fight for open access to scientific research. Now it’s up to Governor Jerry Brown to sign it.Under A.B. 2192—which passed both houses unanimously—all peer-rev … | Continue reading
In the last few years, we’ve discovered just how much trust — whether we like it or not — we have all been obliged to place in modern technology. Third-party software, of unknown composition and security, runs on everything around us: from the phones we carry around, to the smart … | Continue reading
EFF needs a few good volunteers. With many important technology projects in the works and a limited amount of staff and time, we are always looking for volunteers with the skills to help us support the open source projects that we run.If you are a designer, programmer, security a … | Continue reading
Today we are publishing a new EFF white paper, The Cautious Path to Strategic Advantage: How Militaries Should Plan for AI. This paper analyzes the risks and implications of military AI projects in the wake of Google's decision to discontinue AI assistance to the US military's dr … | Continue reading
Table Of Contents Introduction What Aspects Are Most Legally Risky? What Legal Doctrines Affect Reverse Engineering? Copyright Law Limiting Reverse Engineering Copyright Law Allowing Reverse Engineering Reverse Engineering Court Decisions Trade Secret Law and Reverse Engineering … | Continue reading
Employees at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have raised public concerns about those companies assisting U.S. military, law enforcement, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in deploying various kinds of surveillance technologies. These public calls from employe … | Continue reading
Create strong passphrases with EFF's new random number generators! This page includes information about passwords, different wordlists, and EFF's suggested method for passphrase generation. Use the directions below with EFF's random number generator dice or your own set. And now, … | Continue reading
Every three years, the US Copyright Office undertakes an odd ritual: they allow members of the public to come before their officials and ask for the right to use their own property in ways that have nothing to do with copyright law.It's a strange-but-true feature of American life … | Continue reading